Education

Seeking Validation: Common Standards Committee Named

By Sean Cavanagh — September 24, 2009 1 min read
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The leaders of an effort to draft common, college-and-career readiness standards have named members of a “validation committee,” charged with giving final review to the document. That project is being directed by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association, and a new draft is now out for public comment. The list includes a lot of names familiar to devoted EdWeek readers, among them scholars and experts in all sorts of education policy areas.

A few of the recognizables: Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford University professor and adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign; Lauren Resnick, professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Pittsburgh; and, coming to us from Paris, Andreas Schleicher, head of indicators and analysis for the education directorate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD.

Interestingly, Schleicher is just one of several on the list who has background in international standards and country-by-country comparisons. William Schmidt, of Michigan State, is another. Also included: Barry McGaw, a professor of education at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, who’s the OECD’s director of education.

Some of those named have previously served on separate “feedback” panels, named over the summer, tasked with reviewing earlier drafts of the document. Members of the validation committee were nominated by state and national organizations; final selection was made by a team of six governors and six state education chiefs, according to the CCSSO and NGA.

I’m told that the full list will be posted on the Common Core standards site soon.

On a related topic: In case you missed it, the New York Times staged an online forum this week with comments from various scholars and interested parties on standards. The Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey, Sandra Stotsky of the University of Arkansas, and others offer their thoughts.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Curriculum Matters blog.